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By Root 877 0

& trouble I have had,” he wrote to a friend. “Unspeakable—my physical sickness, bad as it is, is nothing to it.” In February of 1875 he had another paralytic stroke, this one on his right side. After his mother’s death Whitman had moved from Washington, D.C., to Camden, New Jersey, at first living with his brother George and then by himself in a house on Mickel Street. It was the first home he had ever owned, but these were bad years, with Whitman isolated, debilitated, and depressed.

Early in 1876 Whitman met Harry Stafford, an eighteen-year-old boy working in the Camden printing office where Whitman’s book Two Rivulets was being set in type. Stafford’s parents owned a farm not far away in the New Jersey countryside, and Whitman soon became their constant visitor. George and Susan Stafford had seven children, and before long Whitman took his place by the fire as grandfather to the whole brood. He took young Harry under his wing. They wrestled and roughhoused together. “Walt, the semi-invalid, drew enough strength from the younger man to pin him to the floor …,” says Justin Kaplan. “They cut up like two boys and annoy me sometimes,” a friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, wrote in his diary after a visit. Whitman was both father and mother to the boy, teaching him to read, offering advice on employment and education, buying him clothes and (for Christmas) a gold watch, asking the print shop to be sure that he learned how to set type, and so forth.

Whitman would have liked to be something more than a parent. “My nephew & I when traveling always share the same room together & the same bed …,” he tells a prospective host. In September of 1876 he gave Harry what was ostensibly a “friendship ring,” but as the difficulties it stirred up make clear, it was something more besides. Whitman’s rather spare journal entries are all we have to tell the story. Interlined among street addresses and records of petty cash we find:

talk with H S & gave him r[ing] Sept 26 ′76—(took r back)

Nov. 1—Talk with H S in front room S street—gave him r again

Nov 25, 26, 27, 28—Down at White Horse [i.e., the Staffords’ farm]—Memorable talk with H S—settles the matter.

Dec 19— …

evening, sitting in room, had serious inward rev’n & conv’n

—saw clearly …

what is really meant—

—very profound meditation on all—happy & satisfied at last …

(that this may last now

without any more perturbation)

scene in the front room Ap. 29 with H

July 20th ′77, in the room at White Horse “good bye”

And so forth. The relationship did not break off, the two men continued to see each other regularly that year, but Stafford was moody and quick-tempered while Whitman, we may infer, was perturbed. The ring seems to have remained with the poet. Early that winter, after a visit from Whitman, Harry wrote him an erratically spelled letter: “I wish you would put the ring on my finger again, it seems to me ther is something that is wanting to complete our friendship when I am with you. I have tride to studdy it out but cannot find out what it is. You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me and that was death.” And next we read in Whitman’s journal: “Feb 11 [1878]—Monday—Harry here— put r on his hand again.”

Whitman wanted to marry before he died. His mother’s death seems to have freed him, or spurred him on. Four months after her funeral Whitman sent a friendship ring to Anne Gilchrest, an ardent English admirer who had been pursuing him for years in letters. Three years later, despite Whitman’s cautions, she arrived at the dock in Philadelphia. Whitman could have made a marriage of convenience. The woman was more than devoted to him—she set up housekeeping in Philadelphia, kept a special room for him to stay in, fed him Christmas dinner … But she had completely misread the erotic poems. It was, as it had always been, the unlettered boy whom Whitman sought to marry to his soul, “some low person …, lawless, rude, illiterate …”

One has to admire his unflagging desire. It was an old, lonely, crippled man